Friday, 13 May 2016

Managing Documents with SharePoint Document Center

We recently dealt with a client that had a very specific requirement regarding document management in the SharePoint environment. Most of this was due to ISO requirements.

They had a current SP environment running on SharePoint 2010 with custom dev for things like UID's for documents etc.

We went in and installed SharePoint 2016, (There was other requirements as well). I create the site structure as before, but this time used a SharePoint Document Center.

Very important to note, or just a tip, before creating the site collections, activate the Document ID Feature in SharePoint. It can be done afterwards, but it seem to take a while, or not work always. For more info on setting that up, have a look Here

I added some Custom Content Types and Columns as per the clients Request - Results can be seen below :

Note the UID next to each document. This is auto generated by SP, no need to custom dev or columns with calculations etc. :-)

One of their other requirements was to have some of the SharePoint Columns appear as Information in their templates, and populated as a new document is created from a Content Type. This was the fun part to figure out, as some things are not as obvious as it may seem.

Above image shows how i have edited a Word Document's header, added a table with the required descriptions on the left. Now we have to insert the actual values on the right.

Select the cell in table where you want to insert the value, go to Insert Tab on the Ribbon, and Select Quick-Parts - Document Property. A list of available properties. The custom columns appear in the list, Document Creator, Document Type and Department (Custom - Using Managed Metadata)

There were 2 fields i had issues with, initially the Document ID column was not available. What i did was save the template to a document library, which forces the updating of content types and the creating of an initial Document ID. I could then find the Document ID Value from the list.

The second one i had issues with is the "Version" field. For some odd reason, it is just not available to insert, but i found a workaround.

Go into the document library where the documents will be stored - Library Settings and then click on Information management policy settings.

Click to Enable labels and put this into the label format box : Version : {Version} \n . Then click to save.

Go back to the document in Word , or it might need to be saved and re-opened. If you now go to word, you will see under the document properties, there is a field called label, that will now allow you to insert the version number.

The end product will look like this :

This document can now be attached to a content type for easy access for the end user, using the "new file" option from the Document Library

If you have questions let me know by using the comments. Will help where i can.